WordPress

Step-by-Step video walks you through how to make a manual backup of your WordPress website with the Duplicator Plugin

WordPress meetups can be pure gold. For me it was the day someone recommended using a free plugin called Duplicator.

I asked about migrating a website, but soon discovered that I could also use Duplicator to manually backup my website, too.

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Why Create a Manual Backup?

Today most website hosts backup your site daily. That’s great if you catch a problem within 24 hours.

For example, one day someone reached out because his website had become a fake Viagra sales page. His site was hacked, and his web host could not retrieve his old site information because it had been months since he had checked his website, and months of Viagra sales page “backups.”

If he had created a manual backup with Duplicator right after his site was built, he could have gone back to that version, but all was lost.

Duplicator Plugin for Manual Backups

If you’re looking to schedule automated, set-it-and-forget-it backups, this plugin is not for you.

The benefit to Duplicator is once you run the first complete backup, you simply click one button to make more backups. It could not be easier.

Video Transcript

How to Use Duplicator Plugin To Backup Your WordPress Website

Welcome to 10-Minute Monday. 

Today I’m speaking about how to manually backup WordPress with duplicator, which is a plugin. There’s a free version and a paid version. I’ve always used the free version.

Duplicator is a manual backup verses plugins like BackupBuddy and a few others that are automated: you set them up. But  I really liked Duplicator.

I’ve been using it since 2015. You have a copy of it on your hard drive or on your website, on your computer. Or you can put it onto a separate hard drive, And that really works for me.

 I’m going to show you how to put this in (install it). I’m putting this in from scratch on one of my websites. 

 So I have logged into my site and I’m going to go to the backend. I’m going to put in a plugin and the plugin is the Duplicator plugin.

Under plugins, click add new. Where it asks you to search for what you want, search plugins, I’m going to type in duplicator.

 This is definitely the one that we want.

So just click install now, and then  activate it. It is by Snap Creek. Duplicator Snap Creek. It’s been around  for quite a while.

And what’s also great about this plugin is that once you make a backup of your site, if you wanted to change website hosts, or, there are people who actually create websites on their desktop before they upload them.

This is going to give you all the information that you want because it’s creating a database for you, as well as duplicating all of your WordPress files. 

So I’m going to go back into installed files and make sure that it’s activated. And it is because I can see right away, as you can see on the left-hand side now in the dashboard, you see the word Duplicator.

And then I’m going to click on the word packages.

No package is found because  I haven’t duplicated this site yet. So all I do is click the, create new button.

I’ve got the storage archive and installer.

The next thing I’m going to create is the package. I do want to create the whole package. 

What it’s doing is scanning the site. You can see right here, size check there’s a notice,  and you do not have to have all greens to be able to run this program. It is recommended, but this is my test site.  I’ve got a number of things on there. So I’m going to input yes.

Continue with the process and let’s Build this.

So you can see that it’s building my package and depending on how large your site is, it will take longer, but it really doesn’t take very long at all.

Now I can either do the install or separately from the archive, but I’m just going to do this one click download because I do want both the installer and the archive.

These are the two pieces that I need. Should my site ever go down the installer runs the archives, which is the entire database and all of your WordPress files. So I’m going to click download or one click install.

I don’t know if you could see this, but it downloaded onto my desktop.

When I show this in the Finder this is telling me that it’s made a complete archive of my site. Now I will take this and put it somewhere on my desktop. 

Every single website that I have has its own folder. So, for example, if I were to put it on my desktop and I would just drag it over from the downloads it’s right here.

But there it is. 

I could burn a disc. I could put it onto a separate hard drive, so if your site should ever go down. You can also see it gives you the date. So depending on how often you go into your site, and how many new things you add, you could be backing up once a week.

You can be backing up every day, if you wanted to, but once you have gone through this process, go to duplicator and packages and tell it to run it again. Create New. So basically all you’re doing is clicking, Create New, and then have it. Create your package, which includes everything: the installer and all the archives.

If your websites goes down (or gets hacked) I would call my host and I’d say, “My site is down. I have made a backup with the Duplicator plugin.”

Sometimes our sites go down and we don’t even know they’re down.

So if you website host keeps backing up daily, they’re going to only give you the last backup. They may be backing up a site that’s been dead. So therefore you then say, “Can you please, walk me through how to do this?”

They’re very, very good. I would just call the host and say, “I’ve got the files help me get this on.”

You give them the whole zipped file (that Duplicator created) and then they would go into your C-panel for you, and replace (the old file with the files you created with the Duplicator plugin) and you’re good to go. 

So once again, it is called the Duplicator plugin. It’s been around for a long time and I’ve been using it for the last five years and I’ve never had a problem with it. And this is only for WordPress. 

Or you could pay for a backup plan with your website hosts. But if your site goes down you would call your host right away and say, “I’ve got a problem. Get into my C-panel and restore this,” and they could. But if you get hacked and you don’t know you’ve been hacked, they (website hosts) don’t keep your files for more than I think, 48 hours.

And that’s why this is really assurance. If you find that you’ve been hacked or you had a any kind of a problem, you’d go to the version before that. And at least you’ve got that part of your website saved. You have a complete version of your website saved the database and all the WordPress.

How many (backups) do you keep? I would only keep the last one. I would just keep deleting the others.  

When I say hacked, for example, one day Jerry came to a 10-Minute Monday. I went onto his site and it was turned into a Viagra site.

I said, “Jerry, have you changed businesses?”

I’ve heard about this, but to see it, and he says, “Oh no, I didn’t do that.”

I said, “Probably what happened was you had an old plugin, and whatever server you’re on, one of these nasty spam robots got in and they got in through an old plugin  and they took over your site, which is actually very common.

Knock on wood. It hasn’t happened to me.

How do you protect your side from being hacked? Keep it backed up. If you go into Dashboard and Updates and you see any little red buttons, just keep it backed up.

Sounds good. Well, thank you for coming today. 

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